Social Media
You Won't Believe This: Facebook Tries to Weed Out 'Clickbait'
Image: Paul Sakuma/Associated Press
The social network revealed the change in a blog post on Monday, citing continued pressure from users to present better content in the News Feed.
To do that, Facebook is employing a metric becoming increasingly popular across the Internet: time spent on page.
"If people click on an article and spend time reading it, it suggests they clicked through to something valuable. If they click through to a link and then come straight back to Facebook, it suggests that they didn’t find something that they wanted," Facebook employees Khalid El-Arini and Joyce Tang wrote in the blog post.
The change could have a major impact on digital media companies. Facebook has become one of the most influential publishing platforms, driving major traffic to sites that have a strong following on the site and are able to get users to share posts with friends.
Facebook drives the most traffic of any social network, and it's not even close. Facebook drove 23% of all social traffic in June 2014, with Pinterest at 5.7% and Twitter at 1%, according to Shareaholic.
Facebook added that likes and comments will also be factored in to the rankings.
"Another factor we will use to try and show fewer of these types of stories is to look at the ratio of people clicking on the content compared to people discussing and sharing it with their friends," the Facebook team wrote. "If a lot of people click on the link, but relatively few people click Like, or comment on the story when they return to Facebook, this also suggests that people didn’t click through to something that was valuable to them."
Clickbait began as a term for headlines that offered up only a certain piece of information. Facebook used the example "You'll NEVER believe which two stars got into a fight on the red carpet last night!! CLICK to find out which starlet they were fighting over!!"
Over time, the term has broadened. It can now refer to anything from a story with a catchy headline to content on certain topics that have become popular online such as the Ebola outbreak or the ice bucket challenge. Coincidentally, John Oliver released a video clip on Monday taking sites to task for their over-the-top headlines.
Facebook left little doubt about the possible effect of these changes — less traffic for clickbait, and less clickbait in News Feeds.
"A small set of publishers who are frequently posting links with click-bait headlines that many people don’t spend time reading after they click through may see their distribution decrease in the next few months. We’re making these changes to ensure that click-bait content does not drown out the things that people really want to see on Facebook," the blog post stated.
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